CALAMITY HOWLER/A.V. Krebs

Bullies in Streets, Suites Batter WTO

As a journalist, muckraker, whatever and a long-time prairie
populist the media-dubbed "Battle of Seattle" and the subsequent
collapse of the World Trade Organization Ministerial talks left me
unbeaten, ungassed, unarrested, but nevertheless leery, frustrated
and angry.

Simple corporate greed, the bullying tactics by the United States
trade representatives and their economic allies, and the lack of any
semblance of genuine democratic process within the WTO itself clearly
destroyed any chance that the 135 nations meeting in Seattle could
arrive at any substantive agreements on world trade. At the same time
outside of the city's Convention Center some 40,000 advocates of fair
trade and a small handful of riot-prone protesters unmasked and
dragged the WTO into the public spotlight.

Aside from such demonstrations the outcome of the WTO meeting was
entirely predictable in view of the growing world hostility to a
"Millennium Round" and the consequent failure of the year-long Geneva
negotiations to even agree on an agenda for Seattle. Any continuing
talks, most critics now agree, in that same direction are equally
doomed to failure.

"The things people believe in are less secure," Don Seligman, head
of the Sierra Club's trade office reflects. "Their communities are
more fragile. They're more isolated, and it all adds up to a growing
sense of insecurity and powerlessness despite the improving economy.
And people are beginning to connect that to corporate power, media
control, and politics stacked against them."

It was this feeling of "loss of control" amidst a world that is
rapidly changing while unchecked global capitalism runs amuck that
was dramatically played out on the streets and in the meeting halls
of Seattle last month as labor, environmentalists, consumers AND
farmers came together in solidarity and protest.

Leery

Yet, in their efforts to underscore and assert the fact that you
cannot have political democracy without economic democracy those
individuals and Non Government Organizations (NGO's) who came to
Seattle exhibited a certain measure of disturbing flaws that unless
recognized and addressed could in the long-term seriously undermine
what some have called the "new radicalism."

In speaking truth to corporate power one has to be somewhat
skeptical when they see people yelling for and cheering speakers rail
against international McDomination at a labor rally and then dash
across the street to grab lunch at a nearby McDonalds before
participating in a parade protesting corporate power; when local
television clearly shows a black-clad anarchist destroying a Nike
store facade while wearing a pair of Nike shoes, when a young
tear-gassed "protester" is asked why he wants to shut down the WTO
meeting and with a blank look on his face asks "what's the WTO?"

Obviously, the Seattle Police Department underestimated the size
and scope of the number of people who were to take part in the WTO
demonstrations, despite warnings from organizers in the months prior
that the city should expect some 50,000.

Mike Dolan, deputy director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch
Program, later testified before a Seattle City Council hearing that
he also wanted to dispel suggestions that police were misled by
protest organizers who promised peaceful actions. He said Ruckus
Society organizers made clear their goal was to shut down the WTO,
and said only a naive police department would think that meant using
only "clever signs and powerful chants," he said. "The Seattle Police
Department was not sucker-punched," he insisted.

Once the demonstrations began local law enforcement clearly
overreacted. Even after the demonstrations began the SPD's choice of
who to gas and who to arrest remains highly suspicious given the fact
that among the thousands who were gassed and the over 600 who were
arrested not one of the 30 or so anarchists that were clearly
instigating, who started destroying property, painting graffiti on
buildings and creating general mayhem were among those arrested.

In the four days of violence the major media and politicians,
including Washington State's own self-styled liberal U.S. Senator
Patty Murray, got their predictions of such fulfilled. Unfortunately,
also during those four days the alternative press, reporting from
Seattle, in many respects mirrored their establishment media
colleagues, focusing almost exclusively on the physical abuse at the
hands of law enforcement that was taking place in the streets of
Seattle as opposed to the brute force that was being exhibited within
the WTO meetings by those who fashion our laws.

Frustrated

From this journalist's perspective the lack of communication
during the "Battle of Seattle" between the NGOs witnessing the WTO
proceedings and the people in the street was disappointing as, no
thanks to reports in the major media, it was not until the last day
of the proceedings that it became evident to many in the streets that
the talks had failed and that no new agendas would come out of the
so-called "Millennium Round."

This lack of communication was in marked contrast to the weeks and
months prior to the Seattle meetings when groups from literally
throughout the world were in constant communication with each other
through the technology of the computer age (ironically an age
pioneered by Microsoft's self-proclaimed innovator Bill Gates, who
along with Boeing CEO Phil Condit were the co-chairs of the Seattle
WTO Host Committee).

One had to have access to Nitya Chakraborty in the Hindustan
Times, for example, to learn during the third day of the WTO
meeting that "as the trade ministers of Latin American and the
Caribbean countries said today that as long as the conditions of
transparency, openness and participation of all members were not
ensured, they would not join hands to provide the consensus required
to meet the objectives of this meet.

"The joint statement of these members even said that they were
concerned that the working groups set up by the WTO had ended up as
an exercise in pretense rather than transparency. In fact, the target
of all dissidence and protests at the WTO meet was Ms
[Charlene]Barshefsky, [U.S. Trade Representative] who
conducted the proceedings like a bully, caring little for the views
of the Asian, African and Latin American countries. Indian delegates
too had a taste of her partisanship. She functioned as if her only
responsibility was to carry out the personal agenda of Bill
Clinton."

Likewise, while the labor march drew considerable attention on the
opening day of the WTO meetings other marches and rallies received
frustratingly scant, if any, attention from both the established
media and the alternative media. An excellent example was the
treatment received by family farmers and their supporters.

Thursday had been designated as Food and Ag Day at WTO. Farmers
from more than 30 countries participated in a day-long series of
press briefings, panel discussions and workshops. One of the
highlights was a noon rally to support small farmers that attracted
5,000 people to the city's historic Pike Place Market. Speakers at
the rally included Jim Hightower, Ralph Nader, India's Vandana Shiva,
Roger Allison, Helen Waller, Peter Rosset, Uruguay's Alberto
Villarreal, Canada's Corky Evans, and yours truly. Also speaking at
the rally was José Bové, the French farmer who's become
a leader in efforts to stop the globalization of genetically
engineered foods and the destruction of local agricultural
communities.

In addition to several hundred farmers from around the U.S. and
the world, the crowd included a broad spectrum of representatives
from environmental, labor, and human rights organizations. None of
the violence that was in evidence in the city during the previous two
days marred Food & Agriculture Day.

After the rally a large contingent marched over a mile along the
Seattle waterfront to Pier 86 to hold a small peaceful demonstration
outside the fence of a police-encased Cargill grain elevator, leased
for the past 30 years by the nation's largest private corporation
from the Port of Seattle.

The kickoff event of the Food & Ag day activities was a Farmer
Breakfast at the United Methodist Church in downtown Seattle. The
breakfast, hosted by the Vashon Island Growers Association, featured
an abundance of organically grown foods produced by local farmers and
drew several hundred people.

Following a series of press briefings, panel discussions and the
noon rally, there were workshops in and near the Market on the topics
that included Globalization & Food Safety, Food Security in a
Global Economy, Farm Worker Issues, and Genetic Engineering. These
events included farmers from England, Belgium, Norway, Finland,
Japan, Korea, India, The Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh, Senegal,
Ghana, Uruguay, Mexico, Brazil, and Peru.

Participants in Food & Agriculture Day included
representatives of the National Family Farm Coalition, the French
Farmer's Union, the Peasant Movement of the Philippines, the Japanese
Independent Farmers Union, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Food
First, Northern Plains Resource Council and both Seattle and
Washington Tilth.

Aside from two and three short paragraphs which appeared in
Seattle's two daily newspapers, the Food and Ag activities went
virtually unreported in both the major media and the alternative
media. Likewise, in the various stories coming out of the "Battle of
Seattle" environmentalists, labor, consumers, sea turtles, "tree
huggers," etc., etc. were all given their proper due. The hundreds of
farmers from throughout the world who were present were rarely
mentioned as being major participants in the demonstrations, despite
the fact that agriculture was the centerpiece of the failed trade
negotiations in Seattle.

Angry

Much was made of the fact that when, on the eve of his arrival in
Seattle, Bill Clinton told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that
he wanted a proposed WTO working group on trade and labor to develop
labor standards that would eventually be enforceable by trade
sanctions. That comment, although welcomed by labor groups, irritated
developing nations concerned that they would suffer as a result.

While there is no denying the matter of developing international
labor standards is a complicated question and one that deserves
careful thought it is also undeniable that Clinton's appeal was more
geared to achieving a short-term domestic political gain than
addressing reasonable and democratic long-term economic development.
As Ralph Nader so adroitly put it, referring to Clinton and
presidential candidate Al Gore's newfound sympathy for the victims of
globalization, "Where were they five years ago when they rammed all
this down the throats of Congress in an autocratic, fast-track
maneuver?"

Finally, as a resident of the Pacific Northwest and someone who
has had a lifelong fondness for its "Emerald City" I have found
myself angry over the image of it that has been given to the nation
and the world. The WTO was a meeting that Seattle did not need to
lower itself to stage, but rather was induced and seduced into
staging it by a small cadre of local self-serving corporate
interests.

As Seattle P-I columnist Art Thiel has rightfully noted:
"The assumption that bigger and bolder is always better may be valid
in software and planeworks, but it is not always so for a
neighborhood, a downtown or a civic sensibility."

He adds: "In the inevitable round of recriminations that will
follow the WTO debacle, it would be foolish for citizens to
xenophobically turn inward, spurning every convention, sports event
or party that would draw significant out-of-town crowds. What is
worth revising is how we do civic business. For years, this town held
a reputation for process second to none in America. Whether that's
good or bad is another issue. But there was no debate on WTO, only a
wink and a pat on the head from the poobahs.

"Nor was there much help from the media before the deal was done.
Neither the Post-Intelligencer nor The Seattle Times
did an adequate early job of representing the threat or the
significance of the WTO. Local TV news is so helpless on complicated
stories, it's not even worth blaming. Explanations are in order, but
I am not too excited about spins from the media, Boeing spokespeople,
Microsoft shills or front people."

Neither should those people living outside of Seattle, for such
spins on the "Battle of Seattle" have and will vary from the
ridiculous to the absurd, as evidenced by New York Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani who opined, "It indicates the remaining damage that Marxism
has done to the thinking of people."

Not only did the surreal scenes of chaos on Seattle streets
obscure the substantive work of grassroots groups from around the
world that is being done to bring social and economic justice to the
"new world order," but it also obfuscated the faulty and undemocratic
structure of the World Trade Organization itself, and once again
confirmed the words of the 19th century German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer:

"All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."